The protection of cultivations, seeds and biotech are required to manage a bigger agricultural productivity. As affirmed by Carlos Buzio, president of CropLife Latin America, "it's estimated that 48% of the harvests on a global level are saved by products for cultivation protection. It means that, without the use of insecticides, plagues would eat almost half of production. It's easy to imagine that with just half of production available, food prices would be much higher". Moreover, Buzio affirms that "regarding Biotech, those cultivations had as a result, an economic benefit of $65,000 million, from which a part was due to saving on imputs and on the other hand, a productivity raise".
Producers from Latin America must make use of the advantages they have compared to European or Asian countries regarding the availability of working land. Buzio assures that, of the total area available for agriculture in the world, 41% is in Latin America, 25% in Africa, while Asia Pacific and Europe have 11% each. On the other hand, Latin America is a region that has already shown it has good adaptability and biotech adoption; specially in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Colombia.
Despite Latin America counting on the land availability to widen its cultivations, it's essential to improve competitiveness, which is affected in many countries by problems like the lack of infrastructures like roads and ports.
The president of CropLife Latin America also considers it important that, in Latin America, some aspects are improved such as farmer's training, credit access and new technologies adoption. To highlight that, today, there are horticultural companies in Latin America on the forefront of new technologies, widening the best standards of traceability and quality certification to protect food security, but many other companies in the region must follow the example.
Producers must focus, everyday, in a more effective and sustainable way of producing. Each producer must manage to get as little waste possible in each harvest. To make the effort to assure innocuousness and traceability of food through implementing good agricultural practices must be one of producer's objectives to achieve more effectiveness.
About CropLife Latin America
The companies affiliated with CropLife Latin America bring technologies to the markets in order to raise agro-livestock productivity. That way, they contribute to food security, also because they continuously look for technologies that are less risky for the health and environment. This industry invests more than 5,000 million dollars each year in investigation and development of new pesticides, biotechnology and seeds. As a result of this investment, we have the latest technology novelties reaching the Latin American market. Cultivations like rice and banana would collapse with plagues and diseases is there was no adequate use of phytosanitary pesticides. How to control sigatoka in the banana without fungicides is just one example.
"On a guild level, at CropLife Latin America, we work based on four pillars - the promotion of protection of intellectual property, as a tool to stimulate the arrival and development of new technologies; the theme of regulation, as we work for a legislation based on scientific criteria; in farmer's follow-up programs, like CleanField in packages and AgroCare for formation; and in communications that allow information for farmers and all the public to flow efficiently", affirmed Carlos Buzio.
CropLife organizes every year an International Forum, to happen this year in Punta del Este (Uruguay) on the 29th of March. It will be presented the perspectives for agriculture in the "Cono Sur" (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) - Vision 2030, where the vice-president of Uruguay, Danilo Astori, the Minister of Agriculture of Paraguay, Enzo Cardoso, participate along with other representatives of countries from this area. "With this forum, we look to create a reflection about opportunities and challenges for these countries to improve productivity and sustainability of agriculture", as he concluded.
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